


Of Things That Make Me Uncomfortable

by gaslightgallows (hearts_blood)



Category: Crimson Peak (2015)
Genre: Angst, Brother/Sister Incest, Character Study, Erotica, F/F, F/M, Femslash, Ficlet Collection, Ghost Sex, Ghosts
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2018-03-21
Updated: 2018-10-04
Packaged: 2019-04-05 14:46:50
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 7
Words: 3,621
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14046576
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/hearts_blood/pseuds/gaslightgallows
Summary: Crimson Peakdrabbles and short ficlets. Expect smut. (Will warn for explicit chapters.)





	1. Fragile and Alive

**Author's Note:**

> I wanted a place to put all the short prompt fills that I do on Tumblr, as well as random snippets and ideas that I might expand into full stories at a later date. Tags will change as more prompt fills/characters are added.
> 
> Speaking of Tumblr, if you're over there, please consider following me at [gaslightgallows.tumblr.com](http://gaslightgallows.tumblr.com) for more fic, reblogs about writing, and lots of randomness. 
> 
> Thank you for reading and especially for commenting. Comments are love. ♥

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> “Let’s run away together.” (Thomas/Lucille) (veliseraptor)

“Let’s run away, Lucy,” Thomas would often say, as a boy. “I can get us out.” And he could have. Trapped with his sister in the attic, the clever child had figured out how to pick locks, and at night he would creep through the house on bare feet so as to make as little noise as possible, and steal novels from the library and from Father’s abandoned study, and bring them back to her like the bold, beautiful little imp he was. They would huddle together for warmth under the thin blankets of her bed and he would read aloud to her by the tiny light of a stolen stub of candle.

Lucille still remembered the piping sweetness of his voice as he stumbled over the big words, the smile when she praised his attempts, and the way he had felt pressed against her, delicate and fragile and _alive_ , like a moth. She clung to the feeling of that memory, of Thomas’s small warm underfed body and his soft brown curls against her cheek as he read Dickens and Thackeray to her, and locked it away, against the nurses who came and bathed her brusquely and forced food down her mouth, against the doctors and the specialists and their treatments that left her screaming in agony for days.

She kept all her memories close and private, terrified that the asylum doctors would find a way to rip them from her, as they had ripped Thomas away from her.

“Run away with me,” his voice whispered in the echoing corridors of her mind, cracking and husky with the onset of manhood, his hair soft against her mouth, muffling the vocal notation of what his hands were doing beneath her nightdress.

“Let’s run away together, tonight,” he had urged, when she kissed him with lips still swollen and salty from his climax.

That night… they should have run away that night.

Lucille sobbed in her hard bed in the asylum, years slipping away, thinking always of that night and of the beautiful things that had slipped through her fingers.

The nurses came, bathed her brusquely, went. The head doctor came with a new man, a new specialist, with… Lucille’s pale, empty eyes fastened onto a still-delicate face, fragile and alive as a moth, and the soft fall of brown hair whose curls refused to be entirely contained…

“Lucy… Lucille.” He knelt before the bed and took her hands. Before the doctor, it was all he could do and say.

Slowly, she lifted her hand, still clasped in his, to his face. “Thomas…”

He smiled delightedly, as he had in the attic when she praised his reading. “Run away with me, sister. I’ve come to take you away.”


	2. The Nature of Ghosts

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> "The way you said “I love you” when I am dead." (Thomas/Edith) (veliseraptor)

I once believed that I understood the nature of ghosts, but now I realize I knew very little about the matter. The ghosts I knew were creatures of hate, their souls blistered by their deaths and trapped by the cloying red clay of my home. But I? The moment the knife entered my flesh, it bleached my spirit. I am scored and scorched and cleansed. I cannot hate. I never could. I am not trapped - I am bound, by love.

I walk where she walks, the wife whom I chose, who I loved in spite of what I was, and though I can no longer speak to her, I am with her, always.

This is my reward. This is my punishment. Edith is mine for eternity, but she is for my eyes and for my heart, no more for my body. Not for me the softness of her, and the strength. She overwhelms the senses I have left, and were I still able, I could consume her utterly. She is mine… but I am no longer hers.

So I walk with her. I go where she goes, even across the waters. I am there when she writes, reading over her shoulder. I am there when she speaks with the men who would publish her work. I am there when she visits with the doctor, her friend, who is loyal and true, but whom she will not take for her own. She never will, now.

Because she is mine, and she knows.

She knows that I am with her, always, in the wind, in the red leaves that dance at her feet, in the butterflies that linger about her in summer. She cannot see me, cannot feel the cherishing hands I brush so futilely across her body, between undressing and sleep, between waking and dressing, cannot hear my whispers of love from across the veil.

But she knows, because we are bound. It is the nature of ghosts.


	3. Balm

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> "The way you said “I love you” with a shuddering gasp." (Thomas/Edith) (veliseraptor)

She hears me in her dreams, and my voice is a balm to her lonely heart. She cannot feel the touch that remains to me to give, but when she sleeps, she hears me, not with her ears, but with the soul of one who has always known that there are things beyond this world. “I love you, Edith,” I whisper, stroking my pale fingers over her paler hair, like sunlight through the high windows of a cathedral. In her dreams, she can still feel my touch. That is a balm to my heart.

I do not sleep, but I do dream. I dream of Allerdale Hall, of what it might have been, if I had been a better man – a place of darkness and ghosts and history, yes, but a house relieved of its age-old pain. The ancestral home of my family, restored to its former glory and stateliness, wiped clean of all the horrors that plagued it from the moment my father married my unwilling mother. That was the house that Edith ought to have been mistress of, where I should have refounded the Sharpe family fortunes. Where my and Edith’s children should have played, loved and free from fear.

I lie down beside Edith in her lonely bed, my arm a thing of smoke and cobwebs unnoticed around her waist, and dream. I remember that night at the Post Office – the only night. In a room little better than a cowboy’s log cabin, that she said she preferred to all the grand chambers of my ancestral home, she laid herself out like a banquet for me and lifted her skirts and laughed in delight as I clawed my own clothes off. It was the first time I had ever been naked with a woman, the first time I had ever felt silk and satin against all of my skin and I buried myself in her warmth and made her sigh and moan and bury her shuddering gasps and her ‘I love you, Thomas’s in my chest. She had never been touched before, and she was so eager, so hungry for her lawfully-wedded husband. And I was that, if I was nothing else she believed me to be. An accessory to murder, a fortune-hunter, a committer of incest – but at least I can say before God that I was never a bigamist.

It is the only thing I will be able to say for myself, when I someday stand before the Almighty and am forced to give an accounting of my life. That this one law of Heaven and men, I did not break. It is the only scrap of virtue that I can yet lay claim to.

That, and that I loved my wife. I love her still, though all that is left to me to prove it is to he beside her in a bed that is not mine and insinuate myself into her dreams, to keep my own memory alive. Someday, she will forget me. Or someday, she will die. And I cannot say which inevitability frightens me more.

I cannot forget what was, and what is, as I dream of what might have been, had I been the man that Heaven intended, and not the creature that Allerdale made me.


	4. Safer Immoralities

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> "Emotionally-charged first kiss." (Edith/Lucille) (prunegirl)

_There had been a woman once, in Milan, a pale and cynical woman as eager to escape from the world as Lucille herself. Christine. Though Thomas would tease and call her ‘Christabel’. It was a cruel jest, when the woman had consumption and had died not long after their return to England. But he had been jealous. He had seen and he had been jealous, and she had not been able to resist the temptation of his jealousy. So she had left Milan and Christine behind and returned to Cumberland with the brother who meant more to her than the desperate, careful, iron-tinged kisses of a dying woman ever could. Lucille preferred kisses that tasted of clay._

Edith had never considered women in that fashion. Not really. The only woman she could remember loving was her late adored mother. As a child, all other women after her mother were nothing but frauds and interlopers, wanting to take her mother’s place and take her father away from her. She had never admired any of the girls in her school enough to have daydreamed about kissing them. And the little girls who had been her childhood playmates - Alan’s sisters - had never really liked her. Nor she them, if it came to that. She had always much preferred the company of their brother. In retrospect, perhaps that was why the MacMichael girls hadn’t cared for her.

_Nothing in Lucille’s life had conditioned her to feel any sort of fondness towards the other members of her sex. Women, to her, were all enemies, all interlopers. All trying to keep her away from what was rightfully hers: her home and her brother. Her mother, the nurses at the expensive asylum in Switzerland, the aunt who had taken Thomas in while his sister was ‘away at school’. Thomas was always the prize, the heir, the one to be protected. Protected from her. But Christine hadn’t seemed to care a fig for Thomas. Her attention, her eyes, had seen only Lucille. And she had watched, dry-eyed, when Lucille left her illicit embraces for the safer immoralities of her life with Thomas._

Once, a very long lifetime ago, it seemed, Edith had kissed Alan. Only for research, she had insisted at the time - well, how was a fifteen-year-old aspiring author to write about kissing if she didn’t know what kisses actually felt like? He had bashfully obliged, but from that day to her first kiss with Thomas, Edith’s description of the feeling of a kiss could be summed up in one word: confusing.

_She had never intended to kiss Edith._

She had never dreamed of kissing Lucille.

_Except_

Until

_(they do)_

They are not sure what to expect. Edith thinks she will be confused, Lucille steels herself for the taste of blood. But there are only soft lips on lips and firm hands on waists, and the taste of red clay that is native to Lucille’s month and that Edith has already begun to exude. There is no confusion. There is elation, and there is terror - what will Thomas say? Will his jealousy be worth such another forbidden delight? - but above all, there is certainty. They want this, they need this - here, now, each other.

And for this one assured moment, their lips pressed together, their mouths trading the taste of clay, they are the one and the same against the interloping world.


	5. Trust

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> "She had all my trust and I guess that was never enough." (Thomas Sharpe) (zombiecheetah)

In the spaces between death - between dying in Lucille’s arms and feeling the last lingering touch of Edith’s hand on his insubstantial cheek - Thomas mourned.

Why had it come to this? How had it come to this?

_“We’ve been dead for years, Lucille.”_

Why? How?

_“You promised you wouldn’t fall in love with anyone else.”_

Perhaps that was when it had gone wrong. Not with the other women - not with Mother - but with that vow, so innocently given, in the far-off days when they had still been innocent. He had promised, and he had trusted that it would always be so.

They couldn’t have known…

_“Do you love her more than me?”_

The pain of his wounds faded, but the lancing burn of that question lingered. There was no way to answer, because there was no answer. There was no choice. There was no ‘more’. There was only ‘all.’

_“We can all be together.”_

He had trusted her. His entire life, she had been the one to protect him, to keep him from harm. Just once, he had tried to do the same.

_“You have to trust me.”_

But she hadn’t believed him.

And as the melancholy notes of the lullaby faded away, Thomas cried, closing his eyes at last upon tears of blood.


	6. Ruins

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> “I know you want us to go out and hold hands, and kiss in front of everybody, but it’s more complicated than that.” (Thomas/Lucille) (anonymous)

Lucille hates being naked. It brings back too many memories, and makes her feel exposed in more than simply her body, but she loves the feeling of Thomas’s lips on her skin, mapping her contours, tasting her, relearning and warming her as he goes. It is a conundrum.

“We can go somewhere new,” he tells her, in between lovemaking that shows her just how much he has grown and changed in the last… ten years? Twelve? She’s been away so long, and he is not the boy she remembers. “Somewhere beyond England, away from this place.”

“Away?” Lucille runs her hands through his dark hair, the rich dark brown of aged sap from a wounded tree, and wonders how his eyes still look so young. She knows hers do not. “But we’ve only just come back.”

The trip from Switzerland had been long and slow. Thomas had insisted on making the return journey to Cumberland in gentle stages, to give her time to recover her strength and refamiliarize herself with the ways of the outside world. To give them both time to relearn one another. It has been a long time, since they were children together, but they are bound by blood (so much blood) and could never truly forget the one they had spent so much time cherishing and protecting, to the exclusion of all others.

“I know,” Thomas murmurs, his breath hot against the skin of her thighs. “I’ve missed you, Lucille…” He shifts his fingers and makes her gasp, hard and sharp like a knife to the throat. Who had taught him how to fuck, while she was locked away behind white coats and padded walls? Her soul howled at the idea that anyone else had ever laid hands on her brother, even loving ones. “But the house,” he continued, almost apologetically. “It’s a ruin.”

“It’s _our_ ruin.”

“It probably will be. We can’t afford to restore it, let alone live here. We’ve got nothing, no capital, no prospects…” He rises up her torso like a wave and offers her his slick wet fingers, knowing she loves the taste of herself on his skin even more than he does.

“I have you,” says Lucille, quietly triumphant.

His eyes glow. “And I have you,” he returns, his voice caress unto itself. “That’s why I want to go away from here. From the memories.”

She lays a hand alongside his cheek, feeling the blood rushing beneath his skin, and the sharp cheekbone. “We can’t ever get away from those, Thomas.”

“Not our own, perhaps. But this place, this house, it’s…” He hestitates. “Unhealthy.”

It is not what he meant to say, she knows. He is grown up now, and can’t quite bring himself to say what they both instinctively understood as children. That the house is alive and breathing, as much as they are.

“And down in the village, they all know. They all suspect. They remember too much.” Thomas gathers her close, his lips clinging to hers, pleading with his kisses. “Let’s run away together, to somewhere where no one knows us. We can start over afresh. Live as man and wife. Be free of the burden of Allerdale and all its knowing eyes.”

Lucille quivers in his embrace. But it is a shudder of revulsion, not of ecstasy. “It’s not a burden,” she tells him, with a quiet, forceful determination that almost sounds scolding. “It’s our birthright. You may be the baronet, brother, but I am the first-born. I carry that birthright in my bones. I fought and killed and suffered to come back here, and now that I am home, I have no intention of leaving Allerdale ever again.”

Her words act as a puncture on his hope. “Not even for me?”

“I’ve killed for you, Thomas. Isn’t that enough?” She wants to get up from the bed and pace the room, but his arms are as close to heaven as she will ever get and it has been so _long_ … She settles instead for pulling her chemise down, putting a gossamer-thin barrier between them. It is enough; she sees a shutter come down behind Thomas’s eyes.

“I love you,” he says softly. “And I don’t wish to hide that. Here, we have no choice.”

“You’d rather we abandoned our name, and fled like common criminals in the night, and set up housekeeping together like good respectable Englishmen? As our parents did?”

“No,” he gasps.

Lucille grips his chin in her hand and holds him still. Ah, so his eyes were not truly as innocent as they had first appeared. “Then leave it lie. You are _mine_ , no matter what the outside world should believe else of us.”

He smiles at that, and if there is defeat in that smile, then Lucille tells herself there is relief as well. “And are you mine?”

“Always,” she promises, drawing his head to her breast. “Always.”


	7. Surprises

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> "The world is so full of surprises. Let it surprise you." (Thomas/Edith) (anonymous)

She saw him first out of the corner of her eye, at a charity ball for a New York orphanage. She hadn’t exactly wanted to go, but her publisher felt it was good for her to be seen in society sometimes, and doing Good Works. And since Lady Edith Sharpe insisted on being professionally known simply as Edith Cushing, thereby depriving her worthy publisher of the free publicity that a title on the cover of her books would bring, attending the occasional public function was the least she could do to assuage his wounded business sense.

It had been two years since she was widowed, so when Edith saw Thomas Sharpe at the ball, just briefly in the crowd, and then again in a corner as she circulated the room, she assumed she was hallucinating. 

At the very least, she was mistaking quick glimpses of other men for her late husband. Because Thomas was dead. Truly, emphatically dead. And whatever she was seeing, it didn’t even look like… it didn’t appear the same as Thomas had, the last time she had seen him. Just after his death.

When he flickered through her peripheral vision again, while she was speaking with Alan and Dr. Doyle, she had the strong impression that he was dressed in the same beautiful but threadbare dress clothes he had been wearing when she had first danced with him in Buffalo.

Appropriately, she had been deep in discussion with the two doctors about spiritualism. Alan was more reluctant to tell people that his old friend the author of Gothic novels had seen a ghost in her childhood, ever since Allerdale and the unseen ghosts that now plagued them both, but Edith was blasé about it now. Ghosts simply… were.

So, when she turned away from her companions to catch a glimpse of her husband’s specter, whether or not it was truly a ghost, she fully expected him to vanish.

Instead, there was Thomas, tall and elegant in his black dress suit and white gloves, his dark hair brushed back from his face, walking slowly through the glittering crowd of Manhattan literati.

No one there recognized him, but the people moved aside for him with only low murmurs of admiration and whispers of ‘Who _is_ that?’ And all the while, his eyes were on his wife, intent and almost shy.

_This is a dream. This can only be a dream._ Edith took a deep breath to calm her suddenly pounding heart, and turned to say something to Alan and Dr. Doyle, to dismiss the vision utterly.

But Dr. Doyle was watching the approaching figure with amiable curiosity, and Alan… Alan was as white as a sheet.

“Excuse me,” she heard Thomas say to someone in the crowd, and his voice was the same, warm and cultured and scrupulously courteous.

That was when she _knew_. Even in her dreams, she had never been able to hear his voice so clearly, or feel the way it curled so elegantly and inexorably into her soul.

Outwardly, Edith made no reaction except to become very still, but inwardly, she felt no fear, only a calm determination that seemed to come from somewhere beyond her.

As he came closer, she saw the hesitation in his blue eyes, and the angry red star-shaped scar on his left cheekbone, standing out starkly against his pale skin.

When he came to a halt before her, bowed his tall back slightly and held out his hand, asking without words to dance with her, she remembered the way he had looked at that first dance, when he had asked, ‘Will you be mine?’

“How can you be here?”

Thomas smiled, sweet and sad and adoring, the way he had always looked at her when there was no one else to see. “I don’t really know. But the world is so full of surprises, my love. Let it surprise you.”

“Edith,” she heard Alan begin hoarsely. “Don’t—”

What else her old friend might have said, she had no idea. Edith took Thomas’s hand, and they danced, oblivious for a little while longer to the questions and the pain between them and the people around them.


End file.
